


Until We Meet Again

by scioscribe



Category: Hell House - Richard Matheson
Genre: Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Behavior, Destroying the Happy Ending, Dreams and Nightmares, F/F, Forced Orgasm, Horror, Internalized Homophobia, Invasion of Privacy, Needles, Object Insertion, Post-Canon, Sexual Violence, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:55:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28189572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “I don’t mean ordinary nightmares,” Fischer says. “I’ve had enough of those that I can tell the difference.”“I have dreams too,” Edith says carefully. “Very vivid ones, even. But I think it’s a mistake to read too much into them.”
Relationships: Edith Barrett/Original Female Character
Comments: 5
Kudos: 30
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Until We Meet Again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xenocuriosa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xenocuriosa/gifts).



It’s been two years since Edith last saw Fischer.

He looks worse for wear: his hair, already threaded through with gray, is untrimmed, and his skin is sallow. He’s lost so much weight that he’s an odd collection of jutting bones, all sharp lines and unnatural angles.

She has to try hard not to feel her own health indicts her. When she looked in the mirror this morning, she saw the rosy tint to her face and the new fullness of her cheeks, as round and bright as apples. A breath seemed to stir against her skin— _I’d like to take a bite out of you._ She looks like someone who has been enjoying herself.

When Fischer says, “You’re looking well,” she knows he means it.

* * *

Three women are rutting on the banquet table at the Belasco House. One of them is flat on her back, her legs splayed open. Her exposed cunt, a dark pink triangle, is glistening and untouched. She’s presented for an unusual violation: another woman is lacing needles through the skin of her inner thighs, taking up little pinches of delicate, sensitive skin and then forcing the needle through. When she pierces the woman on display, she wriggles and writhes with excitement. She flattens her palm against her own cunt and rubs up against herself.

The third woman sits on the first woman’s face, the lips of her cunt spread open and slicked by the first woman’s tongue. She twitches idly, rolling her hips, stifling the whimpering coming from beneath her.

She leans all the way forward, flattening herself out—her body is long, and she’s so strong the muscles in her back ripple—and drags her tongue along the pinked, pierced skin on the woman’s thigh, making the needles stir. Edith imagines them bristling like porcupine quills.

Now it's a scream that's being stifled.

Edith makes herself turn away.

It’s only a dream, of course.

It has to be a dream, because she saw the end of Emeric Belasco. She saw the lead-lined room. She saw Hell House’s power dissipate, burned off like some poisonous gas. Therefore this is a dream.

And because it is a dream, she feels curiously compelled. _Everything not forbidden is compulsory_ , Lionel said once, about the way particles interacted with each other. He was quoting someone. Edith is heavy-headed, almost drunk. In a dream, it’s fine to do senseless, abhorrent things, so she watches. She presses herself up against the table until she’s bearing down on the edge of it, masturbating against it.

* * *

She and Fischer order lunch. Edith gets a sparkling water, which allows her to pretend that she is still someone who drinks only occasionally—and never before five o’clock.

The waitress seems to notice something about Edith—her boyish body, her short-cropped hair—and she holds Edith’s gaze longer than she does Fischer’s. Her voice drops into a different register, grows slightly husky. Edith asks her name: it’s Marie.

Fischer looks at her after Marie heads to the kitchen. “She was flirting with you,” he says, sounding equal parts amused, curious, and neutral.

Edith can’t bring herself to acknowledge it, not when the conversation would soon turn to whether or not she had flirted back. Instead, she says, “I don’t want to pry, but you—” She hesitates.

“Look like hell,” Fischer says. “I know.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?” She means it, with all her heart. It doesn’t matter that they only speak once every few months, she will bend over backwards to help him. They owe each other that.

“I thought we could help each other.” He speaks more slowly now, like he’s excruciatingly conscious of each individual word and like each one will damn him a little more. “I thought maybe you were having the same problems I was. But that was stupid of me. It makes sense that—I don’t know that you want to hear this, Edith. We can talk about something else. It’s good to see you again. Really, it is.”

“My life's very quiet,” Edith says honestly. “We might as well talk about you. Please, I want to know.”

“I keep having these dreams.”

Something inside her freezes over in an instant. Her lips feel unnaturally stiff as she says, “I don’t think it would be possible to go through what we did and not have a few nightmares.”

* * *

Odile has thick, heavy black hair that hangs all the way down to the small of her back. She’s small and sturdy, and that, along with her hair, makes her look like some kind of shaggy pony. She is one of Les Aphrodites—and, as Edith’s dreams often bring her to the heyday of that sordid group, Odile is still fleshy and cruelly smiling, not starving, mad, and miserable.

She courts Edith, in a manner of speaking. She makes a carving of her, a choppy little figure of badly hacked-up redwood.

The redwood tree, Odile tells her, was thousands of years old. This is all that remains of it. After Odile took the cutting she needed, she walked around the tree, scoring the bark with her knife until she had drawn a complete circle. If you do that, she explains to Edith, the tree will die. Something older than Edith can imagine died at Odile’s hands just so Odile could give her this ruined piece of wood.

Odile knows she has ruined it. She’s proud of having done it so badly, of the sacrifice of the tree being so meaningless. Her lips part when she tells Edith about it, and she almost pants with excitement.

“I left the rest to rot,” Odile says.

The crude little Edith doll is, in a way, an uncanny likeness. Edith has always been flat and narrow and straight—sexless, she once thought. Dry as a twig.

Odile slips the doll into her mouth and sucks on it, her cheeks hollowing out.

Edith would like to be consumed by her that way—taken in, swallowed down, made dripping wet.

It takes her too long to understand that Odile is doing this to prove that the doll has been sanded smooth. That it is not primarily a doll at all.

She spreads Edith’s legs and uses the doll on her. Her thrusts and pumps are brutal, almost battering—this would tear her in two if she weren’t already so horribly, humiliatingly _wet_. It still hurts—it hurts worse than it ever did with Lionel—but she still feels something stir in her as she watches Odile’s hand forced down so close to her body. She props herself up on her elbows to see it better. Odile’s face is inelegantly beaded with sweat, as if fucking Edith the way she needs to be fucked is hard work. And that too excites Edith. She was so easy for so long, so understanding of getting so little, that all she wants now—in dreams—is to lie back and be given far too much, given more than she could ever handle.

Odile brings her to a climax again and again. When Edith, too sore to bear any more, begs her to stop, Odile kisses her for the first time. She bites Edith’s lip until blood comes.

“One more,” Odile whispers. “There’s always one more.”

She pounds away faster now, and with her other hand, she digs her fingers into Edith’s neck and pulls up before she forces her head down, the heel of her hand boring into the base of Edith’s skull. She can not only see what’s happening now, she cannot see anything else. She watches as this happens to her.

Odile says, “Feel it. That’s you, remember. I made it be you. You’re moving back and forth, in and out of your cunt. Come on your own face for me, you beautiful girl. Come one more time and I’ll let you have a drink of water.”

* * *

“I don’t mean ordinary nightmares,” Fischer says. “I’ve had enough of those that I can tell the difference.”

Their table is near a huge plate glass window, and it’s a sunny day; the glare, quite abruptly, is making her head pound. She wants an aspirin, but the easiest person to ask for one would be Marie. She can’t talk to Marie, not right now.

“I have dreams too,” Edith says carefully. “Very vivid ones, even. But I think it’s a mistake to read too much into them.”

She at least wants to believe it's a mistake to read too much into hers. She's not a medium. Just because something is happening to Fischer doesn't mean anything has happened to her.

* * *

There is an elaborate dinner one night. It’s one of the few times Edith has seen only food on the banquet table.

They are dining on a virgin. Her head, severed but otherwise untouched, is resting in a crystal punch-bowl, allowing them to see the suppleness of her skin and the healthy luster of her hair. She was procured from elsewhere, Edith imagines, or else one of the servants. Surely not one of _their_ number.

One of Les Aphrodites—with each visit, Edith is less and less able to tell them apart; it may even be Odile—did the carving, producing ragged cuts of meat, too thick at one end and too thin at the other. The cook seasoned the dish with nothing but salt and pepper and ample butter, and the result is delicious. Edith went to bed hungry last night, and she is, after all, dreaming of food—never mind what kind—so it makes sense that she eats avidly, bent over her plate as if she fears someone will take it away from her.

She was a virgin unusually late in life. This could have been her.

Perhaps that is why it’s so delicious. She’s eating all the spent possibilities of her old life, cannibalizing what was to feed all that she will become.

Then again, maybe it’s just that the meat is so tender.

There are diseases one can get from dieting on human flesh, and she has no doubt that many of Les Aphrodites will someday start succumbing to them. But she will not. When all this is done, she will simply wake up, and, feeling queasy for reasons she won’t dwell on, deny herself bacon with her eggs. She’ll pour a bowl of cornflakes instead. It is safe to assume that there are no cornflakes in Hell House.

At the table, she laughs just thinking about that. There’s something wrong with the sound she’s making. Anyone would think she’s a madwoman.

* * *

Fischer is stubborn—a sore winner, Edith thinks sharply, a man who can’t let himself be happy, who has to keep poking at where a tooth has been pulled. He was the sole survivor in 1840, and he couldn’t let that be good enough: he had to return. He was one of two survivors in 1970, he was the _victor_ , and yet he still can’t let it lie.

“I’m talking about a kind of astral projection,” Fischer says. “No—astral _abduction_. When I dream, I’m being taken out of myself and brought straight back to Belasco. To his house.”

 _Dreams_ were on the list of psychic phenomena observed in Hell House. _Dreams, dream communications, dream prophecies._

If Fischer doesn’t already know that, Edith isn’t going to tell him. None of those terms, in any case, seem to precisely fit what he’s saying—and she deserves the chance to be willfully, touchingly ignorant, to convince herself that if this phenomenon existed at all, Lionel would have known about it. He would have been the first one to tell her that the dreams were nothing, just the mind’s way of sweeping out the detritus of its waking hours. People like Fischer, like Florence, were always too ready to believe that they were in some lurid psychodrama—they couldn’t accept the sheer number of impersonal forces in the world that could buffet them around.

The dreams are nothing. They’re harmless little purges of the worst in her. They’re fleeting whims. They’re ways of grappling with Hell House and making it somehow tolerable.

Most of all, they’re hers, and so not any of Fischer’s business.

* * *

There are no windows to let in moonlight, so the bedroom is pitch black. It’s fine: she had an eyeful of Florence when she searched her, and the details of that creamy skin have stayed in her mind. She explores Florence’s body with her hands and lips and tongue instead. She feels like velvet, and she tastes like rosewater. Edith understands suddenly that Florence brought her own perfumed soap to Hell House, while Edith didn’t think of it and had to use what provided. The scent had been chemical and green.

Florence is so gloriously full-figured. She would be like Venus striding out of the waves. Edith wants to make love to her.

But somehow the urge sours. Maybe it’s when she remembers the soap and thinks that several doors down, the old Edith has been scrubbed punishingly, stinkingly clean.

Venus is only another name for Aphrodite, and Florence would never, ever fit in among Les Aphrodites.

If anything, she’s Diana, bathing out in the open and punishing anyone who looks. She _knew_ what it did to Edith to search her, to inspect the curves and crevices of her body, she _knew_ , she _saw_ —

She sinks her teeth into Florence’s breast, and Florence screams.

* * *

Edith feels a hot flush of triumph as she finally seizes upon the obvious truth. “But we cleared the house. You said it yourself—there’s nothing there anymore.”

He nods, his agreement so quick that it almost worries her. “Yes, I’m sure of that. It’s a dead battery now. Belasco needed power, and the power needed someone to direct it, and all that’s gone now.”

It’s a bad time for their food to arrive. Edith can’t make herself turn her head to look at Marie; the muscles of her neck feel like they’re seized by rigor mortis.

The smell of her chicken salad sandwich nauseates her. She starts to pick it up anyway, just to have something to do with her hands, but she can’t stand the way her fingers sink into the bread, the way it slowly pillows back up again. She eats a grape out of the fruit cup instead, and her stomach closes around it like a fist.

“Well, there you have it,” she says, more airily than she’s ever said anything in her life. She isn’t a very airy person. “They’re just dreams.”

And if they’re just dreams, it’s fine to enjoy them for what they are. If they’re just dreams, everyone does strange things in dreams—the one place where no one else can see them.

Fischer says, “But I think Belasco—either the living Belasco or his spirit, whenever he was at the height of his power—saw us coming. He prepared himself for what would happen if he lost—the lead shielding already told us he was a planner. He planned for this too. He reached out then, and he found us now.”

He looks like a fanatic—unshaven and unkempt, his eyes burning bright. If he were a stranger, Edith would cross the street to avoid him. What has he done in his dreams? How much is he not telling her? (As much as she’s not telling him? Does that reassure her or terrify her?) And if he has done all the things she’s done, if he’s let himself be wild, then how can he want so badly to make that real? How can he want to taint private, innocent horrors—purgative horrors, _strengthening_ horrors—with Belasco's presence?

“He’ll keep finding us,” Fischer says. “He’ll torment and toy with us for as long as he can. Once people settled into Belasco’s house, they never really left it again.”

Yes, Edith remembers that. Belasco owned his houseguests as thoroughly as if he’d had them monogrammed.

She remembers the phonograph, too, the one that started playing soon after their arrival: _It is regrettable I cannot be with you, but I had to leave before your arrival_. There was the barest hint of amusement in his voice. And it means that suddenly she believes Fischer, because Belasco never let being gone stop him before. He watched his guests when they were alive and he watched them when he was dead, and so he watches them now. He will never, ever stop.

He saw everything. All of it. He controlled it. She thought she was in her own mind, but she was in his all along, cradled in his fantasy, in his house’s history.

It still wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. But it was realer than she ever wanted to believe. Lionel could have told her that: it was simply physics. The cat is alive and dead until the box is opened. She wishes she could have asked him what would happen to the cat if it suddenly found out the lid of the box had been off the whole time.

And what would happen, for that matter, if the open box meant that the poison that might or might not kill the cat had been leaking out into the air all along.

An hour ago, Edith was ready to try something new. She thought, _I could ask Marie for a drink. It’s 1972—I can admit I might be interested. I can take a chance. There’s nothing so perverse about it, really._

But she’s tainted now, and she can't be sure what she would do, if she were alone with some beautiful girl. She allowed Belasco to—make her cruel? Give her unlimited chances for cruelty? Stoke her relish? If the dreams weren’t hers, then all she brought to them was herself, so what if the choices she made in them were her own? She did all those things. She liked them. And somewhere, Belasco had laughed at her for it. He steered her through a sexual awakening, knowing that when she was on the cusp of welcoming it, she would learn it had all happened under his gaze, with his careful choreography.

All she has now is Odile, who is really only and horribly Belasco. She has nothing and no one else. She can’t have a good woman—what good woman would want her? What kind of monster would Edith have to be, to bring someone into her life, to bring them to Belasco’s unceasing attention?

“Is there anything we can do?” she says. She sounds broken, even to herself. “Is there any way to stop it?”

Fischer is looking at her, horrified. “I didn’t mean to do this,” he says, almost to himself. “You were fine. You were fine until I said something.”

No. The cat was dead all along. The cat has been dead its whole life. The cat never had a chance, really.

“Can you stop it?” Edith says again.

She sees the answer on his face before he says it. She should have seen it the moment he walked in. Of course there is no way to stop it. It’s been killing him by inches—if he could have stopped it, he would have. He just asked her here to commiserate. And this, she sees now, is what the rest of her waking life will be. Two shipwreck survivors endlessly pulled down by their sinking boat, the water almost closing over their heads.

Edith orders a whiskey.

Soon enough, she orders another.

She is already tired. _God,_ she thinks, _I want to go to bed_ , and her minds skitters away from the thought, a cockroach across linoleum.

Against her will, she wonders what Belasco has planned for her tonight.

* * *

In one of Edith’s dreams, she is simply drying her face on a towel.

The cloth is matted with blood, stiff with it, but in the dream, that doesn’t seem like a good enough reason to stop using it. The dried blood crackles lightly against her skin as she pats herself dry.

She remembers that Fischer once told them that Belasco claimed he could make himself invisible. He would will people to focus elsewhere in the room, and then he would walk among them—a ghost even when he was alive.

She turns around suddenly, as if she’ll catch him.


End file.
